The desire to probe under water for recreational purposes or emergencies or maintenance care of boats is an ongoing need. The first interest being well stated in numerous patents. Between the limitation of snorkels and the complication of scuba systems, several attempts to find a solution to limited diving between the two aforementioned have resulted in the following approaches: Prior art cites gasoline engines, motors, pumps, batteries, trailing pressure tanks and an assortment of these well known items being placed on ties, flotation devices and other assorted vessels. These assortments of well known machinery were all intended to generate pressurized air which would be conveyed by a hose or tubing to a standard diving regulator.
All the flotation systems cited suffer from a number of disadvantages:
(a) The most underlying problem is the complication and pressure demanded by available scuba regulators. PA1 (b) The size and bulk requires large and unwieldy flotation devices, none of which could be easily transported. PA1 (c) The combined costs for all the required pieces of equipment would have excluded it from the recreational market. PA1 (d) Systems citing the use of gasoline engines incur dangers with complicated engines emitting toxic fumes in close proximity of air intakes for divers. PA1 (e) Any battery system that could provide the necessary liters per minute of air on demand would be enormous and not portable in the realistic sense.
There is one exception to this effort to find a middle solution to diving, that being U.S. Pat. No. 4,938,211 by Takahashe et al. It is both very novel and workable. It operates on a very different principle than the present invention however, using a closed system avoiding the standard regulator. The basic drawback is the need to change cartridges every 10 to 20 minutes. And again retail sales price limits the market.